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Barbara Gordon is licking her wounds after being thrashed by Mixed
Martial Arts champion Wen Lu. And I mean, she really got her ass kicked. I
don’t want to make too much of a thing out of it, but Babs seriously got her
meat lumped. It looks like she got hit in the face with a bag of bricks.
Barbara got cold housed. And to make things more humiliating, she finds out
that Wen Lu is deaf. Barbara tries to play it off, like “Oh, that’s why she didn’t talk in the ring!”
No, Wen Lu just knew she was about to batter you senseless and didn’t feel it
was necessary to have a conversation you’d forget later anyway. “All that
deafness must have given her the hyper focus necessary to beat a great fighter like
me!” Keep telling yourself that,
Barbara. Fact of the matter is: You. Got. Beat. After the fight, a couple of
fan girls do run up to Barbara and say they want to be MMA fighters too, and
Babs shunts them off to her new coach, who owns a gym in town. So there’s some
good outcome here, despite Barbara getting a full-court whupping. Did I mention
that? She got black-and-blue tattoos.

Thinking back over the fight with Wen Lu, when Barbara got her head
rattled, she remembers seeing the same tattoo on Lu that she saw on that freaky
Sailor Moon ninja girl from the first issue—and remembers this distracted her
and probably uses that to explain why she took a mat nap! Girl, stop trying to
explain it. Someone pounded your drum and you took an L. For some reason, remembering
this tattoo makes Babs realize that Kai is in trouble! I’m not sure how she
figured that out, but she’s suited up in the familiar purple and yellow on the
next page, having caught some ninja lady in a white costume in their domicile.
She calls out to Kai, who is hilariously being held behind a door with a chair
propped up against the doorknob like a cuckolded husband. Like, is he in
danger? Seems safe as houses to me in there, while the lady in white rummages
around the place. While Batgirl mixes it up, she thinks to herself, “I know who
you are, Wen Lu. I know what you’ve got up your sleeve.” I hope she plans on
sharing this information with the reader, because I understand only about 70%
of what is going on at this point. Batgirl punches her antagonist out of a
window, but she spreads a cape and soars off because that happens in comic
books. As Batgirl stands at the shattered glass, practically signing her work,
she starts second-guessing the advice given by Japanese hero Fruit Bat in the
first issue, and considers that maybe she’s a special case that needs different
training. Newsflash, Barbara: You got your face caved in! Just accept it!
Happens every day! It wasn’t a fluke, or a grand conspiracy, or the result of
some misunderstanding by a decades-old kung-fu master! You caught a bad one!
Accept it and move on.

Barbara sees a miniature spy camera and ascertains that’s why
Moth—that’s the lady in white’s name, incidentally, just stated in one of
Batgirl’s thought balloons for the first time—was hanging around the joint.
Finally, Barbara changes into her street clothes and releases Kai from his
prison…and look, we have to talk about this. In the first issue, Kai figured
out Barbara was Batgirl. Babs didn’t confirm it, but she didn’t deny it. He also
acted super shady, and Kai’s whole being there while she’s on her East Asian
walkabout is suspect. Then in the last issue, it looked like they were hooking
up, and the intimacy scared Barbara—but they both played it off like Batgirl
was a non-topic for the whole book. Now, we’ve got Batgirl saving Kai yet
Barbara shows up to release him, and they never talk about it! Instead, Barbara
accuses Kai of being shady as hell and asking why a ninja Moth lady would be
rummaging around his stuff. He’s all dodgy about the answer, so Barbara takes
off. Which is all the well for me, because Kai was a constant source of
storyline confusion most of the time.

Babs takes off to Seoul, Korea, where she plans on meeting their
new superstar Wen Lu by triangulating coordinates off of the spy camera left
behind by Moth. Okay, I’ll accept it. While in flight, she also tries to dig up
some dirt on Kai, when an annoying white dude sits next to her and explains
that he sells probiotics because they make you poop better. In a very Bill
Dozier’s Batman bit of detective
work, Barbara realizes that the thing that people are trying to get off Kai
isn’t an item, it’s a disease! Or something. It’s part of his innards, is the
point. This is why he had food poisoning the other day, she surmises! Also,
Babs, you ate some nasty shit that day. I don’t know why you keep making
excuses but you can’t fault a man for puking up tentacles. Barbara suits up and
visits Wen Lu, who is in her gym working out. Exploiting her deafness, Barbara
sneaks into Wen Lu’s locker and finds a prep book for a college entrance exam.
Babs is all suspicious, but she’s just trying to better herself, dude! Gosh!
You are always looking for the “angle,” but maybe some things are simple: Wen
Lu wants to be a Physicist, Kai puked his guts up because he tried to eat
something gross to impress you, and You. Got. Snuffed. Face it. Sometimes the
secret to life is that you’re not as good as you think you are.

At the end of the book, Babs is trapped by Moth and a construction
guy, and they’ll hash it out next issue. Look, I like this book. I like the way
it looks, I like the way it reads…but there are just too many weird
characterizations that confuse the hell out of me. Like, oh, everything between
Barbara and Kai. I have no idea what that relationship is, if there is one.
Also, this whole learning to predict others moves by seeing into the future.
It’s hokey, sure, but my thing is that since Fruit Bat I haven’t gotten the
idea that anyone else has this power. I think she wanted to learn the move and
Fruit Bat was like, “Ehh…go on a quest around lower Asia, maybe you’ll luck
out. Don’t bother me, kid.” The art, the layouts, I love—Rafal Albuquerque
seems to capture the fun of Batgirl of Burnside with the cramped quarters of
Blade Runner, and the whole thing seems very manga-inspired. Again: I enjoy
this book. But if you start asking me a bunch of deep character questions
pertaining to the series, I might not be able to answer them. And that’s not a
great sign.

Bits and
Pieces:

Batgirl recoups from her butt-whuppin' by getting down to the mystery at hand: what is specifically happening in this book. The story seems told in broad strokes, with incidental stuff like character names dropped unceremoniously in some thought balloon. The art and motion in this comic book has been phenomenal, which is little surprise considering Rafael Albuquerque is at the board. This issue has good doses of story and action, but I am beginning to lose a little faith in this series.

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